"We use a significant portion of that revenue stream to help Linux. If the revenue stream goes away then so do the services we provide to you for free. They obviously have value or you wouldn't be using them."
This is probably true, but BitKeeper also gets
prestige and publicity from being used by a
high profile customer like Linux. The relationship
is not entirely philanthropic and one-sided.
You are missing a big piece: Arbenz, a greedy left-wing dictator who was after Arevalo. [...]
It was this guy who the CIA helped oust (NOT Aravalo), letting Guatamala be self-governed again.
You mean "the president went into exile and the rebel movement declared Castillo as interim President. He claimed regularized status after a plebiscite in which only oral votes were counted, and a constituent assembly convoked to draft a new constitution fixed a term of office. With parties of the left banned and those of the right blocked, his National Democratic Movement Party won the election in December 1955." Source
Was that so bad? The US tried to help Taiwan defend itself against threatened mainland invasion. Would you have rather lived on the mainland at the time? Or would you have rather had the US topple Chiang and replace him with a better guy?
Why did you snip out the part about the
Philippines? Who were you protecting the
Filipinos from while supporting Marcos?
Anyway, you are using an entirely fallacious
line of reasoning. In retrospect,
Chiang was probably the lesser of evils.
However, that's just like saying that the
African Americans are better off today because
their ancestors were kidnapped a hundred years
ago.
Point is, it is pretty clear that the
African slaves generally did not want to come
to America. They could not have known that
their great grandchildren might live better
lives, and may not have cared anyway. With
data available at the time the decision was
made, Chiang is a ruthless dictator with
plenty of blood on his hands, and the US
chose to support him. You need to live with
that decision, and not justify it to yourself
with information (eventual democracy in
Taiwan) that the US decisionmakers could not
possibly have had.
No, it is not. It has opposed and deposed more dictators.
You have a strange lapse in your argument. My
assertion is that the US is responsible for
many dictators. The fact that it has deposed
some (or possibly more than it has installed,
I don't really know or care) has no bearing
to whether it was responsible for many.
It's like getting arrested for murdering 10
people, and saying you didn't kill anybody
because you saved 12 people the other day.
The only ones that were toppled were foreign-controlled despots which typically won an election and then did away with the election process. Not democracies at all.
"In 1944, the people of Guatemala overthrew the right-wing dictator then in power, Jorge Ubico. Guatemala held its first true elections in history. They elected Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo Bermej to the presidency. A new constitution was drawn up, based on the U.S. Constitution. Arevalo was a socialist and an educator who built over 6,000 schools in Guatemala and made great progress in education and health care." In 1954 the CIA
helped topple this government and replaced it
with another right-wing dictator. Here's the
source.
You need to start looking at real history
You want real history? I lived in the
Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, who oppressed his
people and received aid from the US. I
also lived in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-Shek
oppressed his people (so much so that he
lost most of China to the popular communist
revolution) and received aid from the US.
How much more real do you want it to get?
I don't think it is to society's advantage to make the bargin, and thus I oppose it.
I think I understand what the problem is now.
By "the concept is sound", I mean that it
can be to a society's advantage,
depending on various details such as how long
the patent is effective. By objecting to it,
what you mean appears to be that given this
set of circumstances, you don't think it's
helpful.
I think a small, poor society would be well advised to grant patents liberally, whereas I think a large, rich society should be much more parsimonious.
Just to nitpick, then it doesn't appear to be
a matter of principle, but relative weighing
of costs and benefits.
I would recommend granting a small number of patents (say, a dozen or fewer a year) on devices of proven value in cases where it appeared that there was a real risk that the invention would be lost forever if not disclosed.
I'd lower the bar a bit, perhaps to the point
where endless reinvention hampers society's
progress. IOW, an equilibrium where firstcomers
are amply rewarded, and followers are spared
the pain of reinvention. That indeed calls
for a lot fewer patents, but also those that
must be readable by engineers rather than
lawyers.
In any case, I don't think there's a major
disagreement here.
It is not a fact. It is quite disputable. You are forgetting the historic fact that the US used fliers and other means in advance to warn the civilians to get out in advance of the bombing.
You're disputing the word "targeted", and
that's a reasonable criticism. In the context
of the article, however, it is not really
relevant. The salient point is that the US
knew there were plenty of civilians in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, but chose to drop the bombs
anyway. Knowledge plus choice I simplified as
"targeted", but I respect your objection.
There is an international border between China and Taiwan.
Unfortunately, there isn't. China claims that
Taiwan is Chinese territory, and therefore no
international borders can exist. When a major
earthquake hit Taiwan a couple of years ago,
the Chinese Red Cross insisted (and was
ignored) that international relief efforts
and donations be routed through them. When
the SARS epidemic reached Taiwan, China
insisted that they can take care of Taiwan,
which therefore doesn't need a seat at the
WHO. Basically, if you have diplomatic
relations with China, you cannot publicly
consider Taiwan to be an independent country.
How many millions must be killed before a nation can be labeled "evil"?
I dunno. How many Africans must be kidnapped
from their homes and enslaved before a nation
should be labelled "evil"? Have you ever even
thought of using that word on that period of
your history? Try this on for size: "George
Washington was an evil man." How does that
rub you?
How about a country that refuses to participate
in global efforts to improve our environment,
or to create an international court, and so on,
for its self interest? How about a nation that
ignored genocide in Rwanda? Not evil, surely,
but hardly the model citizen of the world,
either. Who are you to judge others for
pursuing their self interests?
he was much more accurate than anyone ever dreamed when he first made the [axis of evil]
statement.
I have no sympathy for North Korea or Iraq
or Iran. These are all oppressive regimes
that must be horrible to live under. The
reason I raised it is to show a Republican
tendency (but not a monopoly) to judge.
One of the definitions for crusade is...
Which definition do you honestly think George
W. Bush had in mind when he used the word?
(No, I don't think that he's using it in the
Christian-versus-Muslim sense, but I do think
he's using it in the good-versus-evil sense,
which again is a moral judgement.)
these examples you gave aren't very convincing.
Depends on what you think I'm trying to convince
you of. I'm not saying the Democrats don't
want an issue they can moralize on more than
the Republicans. I'm saying the reverse is
also true.
I was disputing
an allegation that Democrats somehow like the
moral highground more. By citing famous
instances of Republicans using strong religious
or moral imagery and speech, I have rebuked
that claim.
As for "evil", who do you think you are to
judge? The United States is directly responsible
for many dictators all over the world, brutalizing
their people and plundering their economies.
It has assassinated leaders it doesn't like,
and toppled elected governments that was
opposed to US influence. Who the hell do you
think you are?
The Democrats (always taking the moral high
ground)...
It wasn't a Democratic president that called
the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire". It wasn't
a Democratic president that labelled a number
of foreign countries the "Axis of Evil", and
declared a "Crusade" against terrorists. The
Republicans, at least in recent memory, use
far more of the religious and moral symbols
in their politics. These choices of language
are stronger than the old favorite "rogue
state", which near the end of Clinton's term
was being replaced with "state of concern".
I'm not defending the Democrats. Just pointing
out that the Republicans are right there with
them, to say the least.
Although it is obvious to you that MP3 encoding is worth money to me (though I have no idea why that should be obvious or on what basis you claim to know what I value and what I don't)
By "worth money", I don't mean that you the
individual pay to use the algorithm. I mean
that the disk space all of us will save is
directly worth money. Indirectly, the
algorithm enables the practical transmission
of music, and may be worth money. It certainly
was worth money to Napster, and worth
(negative) money to various recording labels.
The patentability of algorithms is a recent notion that has been snuck into the patent laws by people who want to make a buck by playing on the greed and ignorance of the public
I disagree. The patentability of algorithms,
as a concept, is sound. It is material
incentive to discover new algorithms, and
in exchange for publication, the society
grants a limited monopoly to exploit the
discovery. The implementation, at least in
the US, is of course deeply flawed.
I am not willing to give up even a small part of my right to do mathematics in order to induce them to do so
Well said, even though I disagree with the
absolutist approach. Do you consider anything
at all patentable, though?
Many people do argue just that, and claim that algorithms should not be protected by patents.
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. What I'm really
saying is that you can probably find an algorithm
so complex and useful that few will argue
deserves the patent monopoly.
Take MP3 encoding, for example. It's obviously
worth money to you, because for the same $100
hard disk you can store 10x more music. It
was worth money to the researchers, because
they were paid salaries. Without patents,
however, they have no way of converting their
work into money except by keeping it a secret.
Most of these "inventions" are so obvious
You don't seem to have read my post at all
before responding. I'm not talking about
the silly patents. I'm talking about the
useful and non-obvious ones.
Just so it's perfectly clear to you, I'll
reiterate. The US patent system is broken:
it awards too many obvious, overly broad,
and utterly unreadable patents for far too
long a duration. However, to discard the
patent system altogether will result in
researchers hiding their work. Algorithms
will simply revert to trade secrets. Fix
the system, but don't toss the proverbial
baby out with the bathwater.
Your point is valid, but Apple is one of only a
few companies doing anything interesting in this
field right now. Within the past year or so,
they have release several new software products
(Safari, Keynote, Final Cut Express, and most
recently Soundtrack), a new line
of desktops featuring a new CPU, and at the same
time updating just about every existing software
title except maybe Appleworks, and every hardware
product that I can remember. On top of that, they
built an on-line music store.
Each of these take significant investments.
The G5 line has not made a single dollar of
profit yet, but must have consumed a lot of
NRE dollars. This is precisely the stage
where companies lose money developing new
products, so Apple is just lucky that they
have huge reserves to still turn a small
profit.
All in all, your observation is rather
cynical. It's almost as if you're suggesting
that Apple would be a better company if they
just laid everybody off, and turn a nearly
guaranteed profit each quarter from bank
interest.
becausse WAP applications are a pain-in-the-butt to write?
Assembly language programs were royal pains to
write, yet there were plenty of them. Whether
or not an application gets written or not doesn't
really have that much to do with the underlying
technology. The question is whether the demand
is there.
Secondly, most new browser phones support at
least most of HTML. Some even support
JavaScript. A content developer doesn't
really have to deal with WML and WAP anymore.
What do you mean, yet? What he was describing
has been the state of affairs for the bulk of the
history of patents.
...and thus we stray further off topic. Within
the context of the original discussion, feel
free to remove the "yet", and the point still
stands. The rest of this post shall no longer
belabor this point.
Historically, a patent is a legal device to
let the government protect and encourage the
inventor or discoverer from copycats. It is
particularly necessary as we entered the
industrial age, where any useful widget you
can invent can probably be easily copied and
mass produced by an immoral competitor.
We are now in the information age, which is
characterized by a historically unprecedented
ready conversion of knowledge into money.
It is even easier today to copy an idea to
compete with someone. Somebody who throws
enough money at the problem can easily put up
a viable competitor to Amazon.com, or to the
iTunes Music Store. (Which is not to say
either business idea should be patentable,
just that any idea in this realm is basically
easy to copy.)
The question is what ideas are worth protecting
with a monopoly. I think few will argue that
the discoverers (assuming you also don't like
to use "invent" for algorithms) of certain
algorithms deserve compensation. MP3 encoding,
for example, enabled vast new applications, and
may one day be credited with changing the entire
business of music. How do we compensate them?
One way is to require anybody who uses their
algorithm to pay them. A patent.
This is not to say that there aren't problems.
For the most part, technology patents last too
long. They are also indiscriminately issued,
poorly written, and all in all more useful to
the legal profession than to the technical
profession. However, that suggests reform, not
anarchy. I think it is a very real danger that
without patent protection, many useful
discoveries will simply be buried deep within
the biggest companies.
Wrong. You don't invent an algorithm - you discover it. Algorithm has been exisiting forever as a part of the math. So, if you patent it then you just participate in a very wrong patent system of USA.
You've just changed the context of the discussion.
I was not making a moral statement on the patent
system. I was discussing the law as it stands.
I don't have a real problem with your ideals,
but it's not reality yet, and therefore have
little bearing on this discussion.
I repeat: the patent protects your algorithm.
The actual implementation can be trade secret,
even if the algorithm is published.
1. SCO's lawsuit is about misappropriation of trade secrets
2. RCU is a patented technology
3. Patents are publicly viewable
4. Therefore, RCU cannot be a trade secret
Wrong. If I invent an algorithm and patent it,
the algorithm is protected by the patent
monopoly, and anybody who wants to implement
that patent has to pay me royalties. If I
then implement my algorithm, the implementation
is covered by copyright monopoly. The algorithm
is not a trade secret, because it is published.
The code to implement the algorithm, no matter
how trivial, is the trade secret.
..money grubbing bastards with very little long term thinking ability.
Are you talking about the executives, or the
shareholders behind them who ignore everything
their companies do other than expecting an 8%
average annual growth of their portfolio?
Investing for retirement? You and I might
be part of the problem.
Obviously the blocks are not random if they reconstruct the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. But each individual block passes all statistical tests for randomness.
The reason I describe your scheme as simply
convoluted is this: you can download all the
random bits you want, but the moment you
reassemble or decode them into copyrighted
material, you've violated copyright laws.
To make it clearer for you, if I designed an
algorithm that generates a song that sounds
like a copyrighted work, use of that algorithm
will violate copyright law regardless of
whether I had any access to an original copy
at all. Copyright is a time-limited (ha ha)
monopoly to make copies of original work, so
however you generate your copy, you are
infringing.
Riiiiight... like my not letting others read over my shoulder (which I hate) means I MUST be reading somethingillegal...
No, it doesn't. If you read my actual post,
I implied that, unlike encryption, which
has an arguable purpose of privacy with no
implication of evildoing, scrambling up the
download into little unrecognizable bits does
imply wrongdoing because it greatly increases
bandwidth consumption for no apparent other
purpose. If you merely wanted privacy, you'd
have just encrypted the download.
If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.
"P2P users" would not constitute a random subset
of the "USA" set. For one, they own or have
access to computers. This fact will likely
correlate with their income (probably average
or better), education level (probably high
school or better), age (perhaps from 10 to
50), area of residence (probably in or around
a big city), and even race ("digital divide").
These are all factors relevant to what they do
on the 4th of July.
what if no file is actually ever sent, but randomish blocks of bits that must be XOR'ed together to reconstitute the file. This means that a file takes double or tripple the bandwidth to download. But which other node sending you a randomish block of bits was guilty of copyright infringements?
Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether
downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken
up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes
copyright infringement. Yes, it does.
In fact, your extra effort to disguise the act
(unlike an encrypted tunnel, your scheme has no
arguable technical benefit) helps the prosecutor
show a potential jury that you at least suspected
your actions were illegal.
No single such packet contains any copyright material, just random bits.
No, every packet contains copyrighted
information. The information is just encoded,
much the same way ASCII is a possible encoding
for a copyrightable novel. In fact, you can
reconstruct the document using certain
algorithms, which proves that the bits are
not random at all.
You really think that the money they spend on advertising will level off?
Yes. As a rule of thumb, advertising costs
cannot exceed the actual profits made from
sales. Sales can increase with good
advertising, but it will not increase
infinitely, or proportionally (the last few
potential customers will cost an inordinate
amount of advertising to reach).
When advertising begins to work efficiently,
the medium transporting that advertisement
will realize it, and raise prices accordingly.
This is why a television commercial during a
football game costs a lot more than an ad in
the local newspaper. This usually results in
an increase of the quality of the ad, making
some of them appealing to watch in their own
right.
All in all, the system is pretty dynamic.
They're not necessarily just going to bombard
you with banner ads twice as big.
Can you summarize the public good performed by your efforts [...]
This is a good question if answered in earnest,
but as it is phrased, is rather easy to weasel
out of.
An alternative: The RIAA, MPAA, and other
parties with vested interests regularly publish
statistics on the effects of piracy. However,
a government agency responsible for the
enforcement of IP laws should have an
independent research arm to gauge the extent
of the problem (to decide how much law
enforcement resources to invest), and to
determine the effectiveness of any particular
enforcement action. Who collects your numbers,
and what numbers can you publish?
I'd rather have non-conforming compilers in specific identifiable cases, than no specification whatsoever which leads to all compilers being "non-conforming" by de facto.
That doesn't really make a big difference in
real life. For networking, you'll probably
use the de facto standard Berkeley sockets.
For 3-D graphics, you'll probably use OpenGL
or DirectX. GUIs are an area where this
approach is particularly weak, but it's unlikely
that the C or C++ committees can come up with
a unifying cross-platform API to satisfy
anybody anyway. The mainstream of GUI apps
are still native code linked against platform
specific GUI API.
create a multiple part standard: C++ Core, C++ Streams, C++ STL, C++ Bounds Checking Extensions, and what have you. Most compilers would include Core, Streams, and STL at a minimum because C++98 defined them.
That doesn't improve the real world portability
of C++ programs. C++, like C, is clearly meant
to be compiled into native code (even though it
is possible to write C and C++ interpreters).
This means that it has the flexibility to link
against implementations of other standard
libraries, such as OpenGL for graphics.
Examine, if you will, the so-called portability
of Java programs. I would expect that most
Java programs would not run properly (or at
all) on a device with a small screen (such as
a PDA or a phone). In fact, most phones
support a specialized form of Java called
MIDP. This is no different in practice than
using ANSI C with a specialized library.
I'm not saying that it's not beneficial to
have standard but optional APIs defined for
every possible application under the sun.
I'm just saying that's a lot of work, and
there's a point past which returns are
diminished.
Instead of leaving it as "undefined", they should define it as "If compiled with array range checking so and so exception should be thrown with the name of the variable and line (given debugging info is one)" or something...so that at least it is USEFUL.
Understand that anything written into a
language standard must be implemented by
everybody, or you'll have a good number of
compilers that are non-conforming. In small
embedded systems, in particular, array
bounds checking is a very expensive and
potentially crippling requirement.
Ask your favorite compiler vendor to implement
whatever additional feature you like. There's
no need to define it into the language.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably true, but BitKeeper also gets prestige and publicity from being used by a high profile customer like Linux. The relationship is not entirely philanthropic and one-sided.
You mean "the president went into exile and the rebel movement declared Castillo as interim President. He claimed regularized status after a plebiscite in which only oral votes were counted, and a constituent assembly convoked to draft a new constitution fixed a term of office. With parties of the left banned and those of the right blocked, his National Democratic Movement Party won the election in December 1955." Source
Was that so bad? The US tried to help Taiwan defend itself against threatened mainland invasion. Would you have rather lived on the mainland at the time? Or would you have rather had the US topple Chiang and replace him with a better guy?
Why did you snip out the part about the Philippines? Who were you protecting the Filipinos from while supporting Marcos?
Anyway, you are using an entirely fallacious line of reasoning. In retrospect, Chiang was probably the lesser of evils. However, that's just like saying that the African Americans are better off today because their ancestors were kidnapped a hundred years ago.
Point is, it is pretty clear that the African slaves generally did not want to come to America. They could not have known that their great grandchildren might live better lives, and may not have cared anyway. With data available at the time the decision was made, Chiang is a ruthless dictator with plenty of blood on his hands, and the US chose to support him. You need to live with that decision, and not justify it to yourself with information (eventual democracy in Taiwan) that the US decisionmakers could not possibly have had.
You have a strange lapse in your argument. My assertion is that the US is responsible for many dictators. The fact that it has deposed some (or possibly more than it has installed, I don't really know or care) has no bearing to whether it was responsible for many.
It's like getting arrested for murdering 10 people, and saying you didn't kill anybody because you saved 12 people the other day.
The only ones that were toppled were foreign-controlled despots which typically won an election and then did away with the election process. Not democracies at all.
"In 1944, the people of Guatemala overthrew the right-wing dictator then in power, Jorge Ubico. Guatemala held its first true elections in history. They elected Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo Bermej to the presidency. A new constitution was drawn up, based on the U.S. Constitution. Arevalo was a socialist and an educator who built over 6,000 schools in Guatemala and made great progress in education and health care." In 1954 the CIA helped topple this government and replaced it with another right-wing dictator. Here's the source.
You need to start looking at real history
You want real history? I lived in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, who oppressed his people and received aid from the US. I also lived in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-Shek oppressed his people (so much so that he lost most of China to the popular communist revolution) and received aid from the US. How much more real do you want it to get?
Let the facts judge.
Great. So tell Bush to stop judging others.
I think I understand what the problem is now. By "the concept is sound", I mean that it can be to a society's advantage, depending on various details such as how long the patent is effective. By objecting to it, what you mean appears to be that given this set of circumstances, you don't think it's helpful.
I think a small, poor society would be well advised to grant patents liberally, whereas I think a large, rich society should be much more parsimonious.
Just to nitpick, then it doesn't appear to be a matter of principle, but relative weighing of costs and benefits.
I would recommend granting a small number of patents (say, a dozen or fewer a year) on devices of proven value in cases where it appeared that there was a real risk that the invention would be lost forever if not disclosed.
I'd lower the bar a bit, perhaps to the point where endless reinvention hampers society's progress. IOW, an equilibrium where firstcomers are amply rewarded, and followers are spared the pain of reinvention. That indeed calls for a lot fewer patents, but also those that must be readable by engineers rather than lawyers.
In any case, I don't think there's a major disagreement here.
You're disputing the word "targeted", and that's a reasonable criticism. In the context of the article, however, it is not really relevant. The salient point is that the US knew there were plenty of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but chose to drop the bombs anyway. Knowledge plus choice I simplified as "targeted", but I respect your objection.
There is an international border between China and Taiwan.
Unfortunately, there isn't. China claims that Taiwan is Chinese territory, and therefore no international borders can exist. When a major earthquake hit Taiwan a couple of years ago, the Chinese Red Cross insisted (and was ignored) that international relief efforts and donations be routed through them. When the SARS epidemic reached Taiwan, China insisted that they can take care of Taiwan, which therefore doesn't need a seat at the WHO. Basically, if you have diplomatic relations with China, you cannot publicly consider Taiwan to be an independent country.
I dunno. How many Africans must be kidnapped from their homes and enslaved before a nation should be labelled "evil"? Have you ever even thought of using that word on that period of your history? Try this on for size: "George Washington was an evil man." How does that rub you?
How about a country that refuses to participate in global efforts to improve our environment, or to create an international court, and so on, for its self interest? How about a nation that ignored genocide in Rwanda? Not evil, surely, but hardly the model citizen of the world, either. Who are you to judge others for pursuing their self interests?
he was much more accurate than anyone ever dreamed when he first made the [axis of evil] statement.
I have no sympathy for North Korea or Iraq or Iran. These are all oppressive regimes that must be horrible to live under. The reason I raised it is to show a Republican tendency (but not a monopoly) to judge.
One of the definitions for crusade is...
Which definition do you honestly think George W. Bush had in mind when he used the word? (No, I don't think that he's using it in the Christian-versus-Muslim sense, but I do think he's using it in the good-versus-evil sense, which again is a moral judgement.)
these examples you gave aren't very convincing.
Depends on what you think I'm trying to convince you of. I'm not saying the Democrats don't want an issue they can moralize on more than the Republicans. I'm saying the reverse is also true.
As for "evil", who do you think you are to judge? The United States is directly responsible for many dictators all over the world, brutalizing their people and plundering their economies. It has assassinated leaders it doesn't like, and toppled elected governments that was opposed to US influence. Who the hell do you think you are?
It wasn't a Democratic president that called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire". It wasn't a Democratic president that labelled a number of foreign countries the "Axis of Evil", and declared a "Crusade" against terrorists. The Republicans, at least in recent memory, use far more of the religious and moral symbols in their politics. These choices of language are stronger than the old favorite "rogue state", which near the end of Clinton's term was being replaced with "state of concern".
I'm not defending the Democrats. Just pointing out that the Republicans are right there with them, to say the least.
By "worth money", I don't mean that you the individual pay to use the algorithm. I mean that the disk space all of us will save is directly worth money. Indirectly, the algorithm enables the practical transmission of music, and may be worth money. It certainly was worth money to Napster, and worth (negative) money to various recording labels.
The patentability of algorithms is a recent notion that has been snuck into the patent laws by people who want to make a buck by playing on the greed and ignorance of the public
I disagree. The patentability of algorithms, as a concept, is sound. It is material incentive to discover new algorithms, and in exchange for publication, the society grants a limited monopoly to exploit the discovery. The implementation, at least in the US, is of course deeply flawed.
I am not willing to give up even a small part of my right to do mathematics in order to induce them to do so
Well said, even though I disagree with the absolutist approach. Do you consider anything at all patentable, though?
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. What I'm really saying is that you can probably find an algorithm so complex and useful that few will argue deserves the patent monopoly.
Take MP3 encoding, for example. It's obviously worth money to you, because for the same $100 hard disk you can store 10x more music. It was worth money to the researchers, because they were paid salaries. Without patents, however, they have no way of converting their work into money except by keeping it a secret.
Most of these "inventions" are so obvious
You don't seem to have read my post at all before responding. I'm not talking about the silly patents. I'm talking about the useful and non-obvious ones.
Just so it's perfectly clear to you, I'll reiterate. The US patent system is broken: it awards too many obvious, overly broad, and utterly unreadable patents for far too long a duration. However, to discard the patent system altogether will result in researchers hiding their work. Algorithms will simply revert to trade secrets. Fix the system, but don't toss the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Each of these take significant investments. The G5 line has not made a single dollar of profit yet, but must have consumed a lot of NRE dollars. This is precisely the stage where companies lose money developing new products, so Apple is just lucky that they have huge reserves to still turn a small profit.
All in all, your observation is rather cynical. It's almost as if you're suggesting that Apple would be a better company if they just laid everybody off, and turn a nearly guaranteed profit each quarter from bank interest.
Assembly language programs were royal pains to write, yet there were plenty of them. Whether or not an application gets written or not doesn't really have that much to do with the underlying technology. The question is whether the demand is there.
Secondly, most new browser phones support at least most of HTML. Some even support JavaScript. A content developer doesn't really have to deal with WML and WAP anymore.
Historically, a patent is a legal device to let the government protect and encourage the inventor or discoverer from copycats. It is particularly necessary as we entered the industrial age, where any useful widget you can invent can probably be easily copied and mass produced by an immoral competitor.
We are now in the information age, which is characterized by a historically unprecedented ready conversion of knowledge into money. It is even easier today to copy an idea to compete with someone. Somebody who throws enough money at the problem can easily put up a viable competitor to Amazon.com, or to the iTunes Music Store. (Which is not to say either business idea should be patentable, just that any idea in this realm is basically easy to copy.)
The question is what ideas are worth protecting with a monopoly. I think few will argue that the discoverers (assuming you also don't like to use "invent" for algorithms) of certain algorithms deserve compensation. MP3 encoding, for example, enabled vast new applications, and may one day be credited with changing the entire business of music. How do we compensate them? One way is to require anybody who uses their algorithm to pay them. A patent.
This is not to say that there aren't problems. For the most part, technology patents last too long. They are also indiscriminately issued, poorly written, and all in all more useful to the legal profession than to the technical profession. However, that suggests reform, not anarchy. I think it is a very real danger that without patent protection, many useful discoveries will simply be buried deep within the biggest companies.
You've just changed the context of the discussion. I was not making a moral statement on the patent system. I was discussing the law as it stands. I don't have a real problem with your ideals, but it's not reality yet, and therefore have little bearing on this discussion.
I repeat: the patent protects your algorithm. The actual implementation can be trade secret, even if the algorithm is published.
2. RCU is a patented technology
3. Patents are publicly viewable
4. Therefore, RCU cannot be a trade secret
Wrong. If I invent an algorithm and patent it, the algorithm is protected by the patent monopoly, and anybody who wants to implement that patent has to pay me royalties. If I then implement my algorithm, the implementation is covered by copyright monopoly. The algorithm is not a trade secret, because it is published. The code to implement the algorithm, no matter how trivial, is the trade secret.
Are you talking about the executives, or the shareholders behind them who ignore everything their companies do other than expecting an 8% average annual growth of their portfolio? Investing for retirement? You and I might be part of the problem.
The reason I describe your scheme as simply convoluted is this: you can download all the random bits you want, but the moment you reassemble or decode them into copyrighted material, you've violated copyright laws.
To make it clearer for you, if I designed an algorithm that generates a song that sounds like a copyrighted work, use of that algorithm will violate copyright law regardless of whether I had any access to an original copy at all. Copyright is a time-limited (ha ha) monopoly to make copies of original work, so however you generate your copy, you are infringing.
No, it doesn't. If you read my actual post, I implied that, unlike encryption, which has an arguable purpose of privacy with no implication of evildoing, scrambling up the download into little unrecognizable bits does imply wrongdoing because it greatly increases bandwidth consumption for no apparent other purpose. If you merely wanted privacy, you'd have just encrypted the download.
"P2P users" would not constitute a random subset of the "USA" set. For one, they own or have access to computers. This fact will likely correlate with their income (probably average or better), education level (probably high school or better), age (perhaps from 10 to 50), area of residence (probably in or around a big city), and even race ("digital divide"). These are all factors relevant to what they do on the 4th of July.
Your scheme is a convoluted way of asking whether downloading a copyrighted work through an encrypted link (through which the work is broken up into little unreadable chunks) constitutes copyright infringement. Yes, it does.
In fact, your extra effort to disguise the act (unlike an encrypted tunnel, your scheme has no arguable technical benefit) helps the prosecutor show a potential jury that you at least suspected your actions were illegal.
No single such packet contains any copyright material, just random bits.
No, every packet contains copyrighted information. The information is just encoded, much the same way ASCII is a possible encoding for a copyrightable novel. In fact, you can reconstruct the document using certain algorithms, which proves that the bits are not random at all.
Yes. As a rule of thumb, advertising costs cannot exceed the actual profits made from sales. Sales can increase with good advertising, but it will not increase infinitely, or proportionally (the last few potential customers will cost an inordinate amount of advertising to reach).
When advertising begins to work efficiently, the medium transporting that advertisement will realize it, and raise prices accordingly. This is why a television commercial during a football game costs a lot more than an ad in the local newspaper. This usually results in an increase of the quality of the ad, making some of them appealing to watch in their own right.
All in all, the system is pretty dynamic. They're not necessarily just going to bombard you with banner ads twice as big.
This is a good question if answered in earnest, but as it is phrased, is rather easy to weasel out of.
An alternative: The RIAA, MPAA, and other parties with vested interests regularly publish statistics on the effects of piracy. However, a government agency responsible for the enforcement of IP laws should have an independent research arm to gauge the extent of the problem (to decide how much law enforcement resources to invest), and to determine the effectiveness of any particular enforcement action. Who collects your numbers, and what numbers can you publish?
That doesn't really make a big difference in real life. For networking, you'll probably use the de facto standard Berkeley sockets. For 3-D graphics, you'll probably use OpenGL or DirectX. GUIs are an area where this approach is particularly weak, but it's unlikely that the C or C++ committees can come up with a unifying cross-platform API to satisfy anybody anyway. The mainstream of GUI apps are still native code linked against platform specific GUI API.
That doesn't improve the real world portability of C++ programs. C++, like C, is clearly meant to be compiled into native code (even though it is possible to write C and C++ interpreters). This means that it has the flexibility to link against implementations of other standard libraries, such as OpenGL for graphics.
Examine, if you will, the so-called portability of Java programs. I would expect that most Java programs would not run properly (or at all) on a device with a small screen (such as a PDA or a phone). In fact, most phones support a specialized form of Java called MIDP. This is no different in practice than using ANSI C with a specialized library.
I'm not saying that it's not beneficial to have standard but optional APIs defined for every possible application under the sun. I'm just saying that's a lot of work, and there's a point past which returns are diminished.
Understand that anything written into a language standard must be implemented by everybody, or you'll have a good number of compilers that are non-conforming. In small embedded systems, in particular, array bounds checking is a very expensive and potentially crippling requirement.
Ask your favorite compiler vendor to implement whatever additional feature you like. There's no need to define it into the language.